Sept. 6, 2007 | On Sept. 18, 2002, CIA director George Tenet briefed President Bush in the Oval
Office on top-secret intelligence that Saddam Hussein did not have weapons of mass destruction,
according to two former senior CIA officers. Bush dismissed as worthless this information from the
Iraqi foreign minister, a member of Saddam's inner circle, although it turned out to be accurate
in every detail. Tenet never brought it up again.

Nor was the intelligence included in the National Intelligence Estimate of October 2002, which
stated categorically that Iraq possessed WMD. No one in Congress was aware of the secret
intelligence that Saddam had no WMD as the House of Representatives and the Senate voted, a week
after the submission of the NIE, on the Authorization for Use of Military Force in Iraq. The
information, moreover, was not circulated within the CIA among those agents involved in operations
to prove whether Saddam had WMD.

Newly released documents regarding crimes committed by United States soldiers against civilians
in Iraq and Afghanistan detail a pattern of troops failing to understand and follow the rules that
govern interrogations and deadly actions.

The documents, released today by the American Civil Liberties Union ahead of a lawsuit, total
nearly 10,000 pages of courts-martial summaries, transcripts and military investigative reports
about 22 cases. They show repeated examples of troops believing they were within the law when they
killed local citizens.

The killings include the drowning of a man soldiers pushed from a bridge into the Tigris River
as punishment for breaking curfew, and the suffocation during interrogation of a former Iraqi
general believed to be helping insurgents.

WASHINGTON: Weapons that were originally given to Iraqi security forces by the American
military have been recovered over the past year by the authorities in Turkey after being used in
violent crimes in that country, Pentagon officials said Wednesday.

The discovery that serial numbers on pistols and other weapons recovered in Turkey matched
those distributed to Iraqi police units has prompted growing concern by Defense Secretary Robert
M. Gates that controls on weapons being provided to Iraqis are inadequate. It was also a factor in
the decision to dispatch the department's inspector general to Iraq next week to investigate the
problem, the officials said.

The use of psychologists was also considered a way for C.I.A. officials to skirt measures such
as the Convention Against Torture. The former adviser to the intelligence community said,
"Clearly, some senior people felt they needed a theory to justify what they were doing. You can't
just say, 'We want to do what Egypt's doing.' When the lawyers asked what their basis was, they
could say, 'We have Ph.D.s who have these theories.' " He said that, inside the C.I.A., where a
number of scientists work, there was strong internal opposition to the new techniques. "Behavioral
scientists said, 'Don't even think about this!' They thought officers could be prosecuted."

Zubaydah told the Red Cross that he was not only waterboarded, as has been previously reported;
he was also kept for a prolonged period in a cage, known as a "dog box," which was so small that
he could not stand. According to an eyewitness, one psychologist advising on the treatment of
Zubaydah, James Mitchell, argued that he needed to be reduced to a state of "learned
helplessness." (Mitchell disputes this characterization.)

Steve Kleinman, a reserve Air Force colonel and an experienced interrogator who has known
Mitchell professionally for years, said that "learned helplessness was his whole paradigm."
Mitchell, he said, "draws a diagram showing what he says is the whole cycle. It starts with
isolation. Then they eliminate the prisoners' ability to forecast the future—when their next
meal is, when they can go to the bathroom. It creates dread and dependency.

The C.I.A.'s interrogation program is remarkable for its mechanistic aura. "It's one of the
most sophisticated, refined programs of torture ever," an outside expert familiar with the
protocol said. "At every stage, there was a rigid attention to detail. Procedure was adhered to
almost to the letter. There was top-down quality control, and such a set routine that you get to
the point where you know what each detainee is going to say, because you've heard it before. It
was almost automated. People were utterly dehumanized. People fell apart. It was the intentional
and systematic infliction of great suffering masquerading as a legal process. It is just
chilling."

In addition to keeping a prisoner awake, the simple act of remaining upright can over time
cause significant pain. McCoy, the historian, noted that "longtime standing" was a common K.G.B.
interrogation technique. In his 2006 book, "A Question of Torture," he writes that the Soviets
found that making a victim stand for eighteen to twenty-four hours can produce "excruciating pain,
as ankles double in size, skin becomes tense and intensely painful, blisters erupt oozing watery
serum, heart rates soar, kidneys shut down, and delusions deepen."

Mohammed is said to have described being chained naked to a metal ring in his cell wall for
prolonged periods in a painful crouch. (Several other detainees who say that they were confined in
the Dark Prison have described identical treatment.) He also claimed that he was kept alternately
in suffocating heat and in a painfully cold room, where he was doused with ice water. The
practice, which can cause hypothermia, violates the Geneva Conventions, and President Bush's new
executive order arguably bans it.

If we, the people, are ultimately condemned by a world court for our complicity and silence in
these war crimes, we can always try to echo those Germans who claimed not to know what Hitler and
his enforcers were doing. But in Nazi Germany, people had no way of insisting on finding out what
happened to their disappeared neighbors.

We, however, have the right and the power to insist that Congress discover and reveal the
details of the torture and other brutalities that the CIA has been inflicting in our name on
terrorism suspects.

BAGHDAD, Iraq — Iraq's deadly insurgent groups have financed their war against U.S.
troops in part with hundreds of thousands of dollars in U.S. rebuilding funds that they've
extorted from Iraqi contractors in Anbar province.

The payments, in return for the insurgents' allowing supplies to move and construction work to
begin, have taken place since the earliest projects in 2003, according to Iraqi contractors,
politicians and interpreters involved with reconstruction efforts.

BAGHDAD: The U.S. National Intelligence Estimate has effectively discredited the dominant
American hypothesis of the past seven months: that safer streets, secured by additional troops,
would create enough political calm for Iraq's leaders to reconcile.

They have failed to do so in part, suggests the report, which was released Thursday, because
the security gains remain too modest to reverse Iraq's dynamic of violence and fear. Baghdad after
all, remains a place where women at the market avoid buying river fish for fear that they've been
eating bodies.

But just as important, according to Iraqi political analysts and officials, Iraq has become a
cellular nation, dividing and redividing, where the constituency for chaos now outnumbers the
constituency for compromise.

A newspaper interview by the nation's spymaster, confirming that telecommunications companies
have helped the Bush administration's clandestine surveillance program, has undermined the
government's attempt to shield AT&T for its role in the effort, a lawyer for customers of the
company said Thursday.

The director of national intelligence, Michael McConnell, said under oath three months ago that
it would cause "exceptionally grave harm to the national security" to confirm or deny that
telecommunications companies such as AT&T and Verizon had helped the government in "alleged
intelligence activities."

But in an interview published Wednesday by the El Paso Times, McConnell said the companies "had
assisted us" in an electronic surveillance program and should be protected by Congress from
lawsuits pending in a San Francisco federal court.

In a March 2007 survey of 28,000 people in 27 countries conducted for the BBC World Service by
GlobeScan and the University of Maryland's Program on International Policy Attitudes, only Israel,
Iran and North Korea were perceived as having a more negative influence than the United States on
world affairs. During 2002-06, European views of the desirability of U.S. leadership in world
affairs has declined from 64% to 37%, while its undesirability has risen from 31% to 57%. Former
U.S. National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski gives Bush an "F" for his "catastrophic
leadership" in world affairs in his new book, Second Chance.

Particularly dramatic are E.U. and world perceptions of Bush. Confidence in the U.S. president
has declined in all countries, mirroring similar declines in the United States itself.

The U.S. Council on Foreign Relations' Task Force on Public Diplomacy has pointed to a
perceived lack of U.S. empathy for other people's pain and hardship (for example, U.S. reluctance
to intervene in Liberia's civil war), arrogance and self-indulgence. The E.U. is the
world's largest bilateral aid donor, providing twice as much aid to poor countries as the United
States.

At least 1,500 will be in Iraq by Dec. 31, according to Pentagon press secretary Geoff Morrell.
But the figure is less than half of the 3,900 an official previously said would be delivered.

The Mine Resistant Ambush Protected (MRAP) vehicle is Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates' top
program priority. During a July 18 press conference at the Pentagon, John Young, chairman of DoD's
MRAP Task Force, had said — "ambitiously," according to Morrell — that 3,500 to 3,900
would be delivered to Iraq in that time.

SAN FRANCISCO - A federal judge ordered the Bush administration to issue two scientific reports
on global warming, siding with environmentalists who sued the White House for failing to produce
the documents.

U.S. District Court Judge Saundra Armstrong ruled Tuesday that the Bush administration had
violated a 1990 law when it failed to meet deadlines for an updated U.S. climate change research
plan and impact assessment.

Though small by government standards, the counter-narcotics contract illustrates the
government's steady move away from relying on competition to secure the best deals for products
and services.

A recent congressional report estimated that federal spending on contracts awarded without
"full and open" competition has tripled, to $207 billion, since 2000, with a $60 billion increase
last year alone. The category includes deals in which officials take advantage of provisions
allowing them to sidestep competition for speed and convenience and cases in which the government
sharply limits the number of bidders or expands work under open-ended contracts.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The Pentagon said on Tuesday it would close a controversial database
tracking suspicious activity around U.S. military bases that critics complained had been used to
spy on peaceful antiwar activists.

Officials decided the TALON program would end on September 17 not in response to public
criticism but because the amount and quality of information being gathered had declined, the
Pentagon said.

The Pentagon said in April last year that a review had found the database included reports on
peaceful protests and anti-war demonstrations that should have been deleted.

But in the Al-Haramain case, the Treasury Department inadvertently disclosed National Security
Agency call logs stamped "top secret" indicating that the charity and two of its attorneys had
been surveilled. Last year, U.S. District Judge Garr King ruled that the logs -- referred to in
the court papers as "The Document" — gave the charity standing to sue in federal court.

Today, Eisenberg and Justice Department lawyer Thomas Bondy will each have 20 minutes to argue
over King's decision before a three-judge panel of the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals. Although
the argument will be conducted in public, much of the information in the case, including what was
in "the Document," remains veiled in mystery.

Many of the government's motions have been filed under seal, and those lodged publicly contain
gaps; one government brief reads: "REDACTED TEXT. PUBLIC TEXT CONTINUES ON PAGE 6."

Some of Eisenberg's briefs have been redacted as well, because they are considered too
sensitive for the public to see. But although Justice Department lawyers can see Eisenberg's
redactions, he isn't allowed to see theirs.

In the Al-Haramain case, Eisenberg has had to respond to a government filing he was not allowed
to see.

Military interrogators posing as "lawyers" are attempting to trick Guantanamo prisoners into
providing them with information, The Catholic Worker (TCW) reports.

This incredible and illegal practice contributes "to the prisoners' suspicions that the (real)
lawyers are not to be trusted and could be aiding the government," TCW says in its July issue.

This subterfuge is only one of the many treacherous tactics the government is employing to
sabotage the efforts of lawyers to represent their clients.

After meeting with their clients at Guantanamo, Newsday reported, lawyers must turn their
interview notes over to guards, who send them on to the Pentagon facility in Virginia that is the
only place lawyers can go to write their motions. There, the military tries to edit out detainees'
claims of mistreatment from the public record.

Some military lawyers have been gagged from speaking to the media after they made allegation
that guards are routinely beating Guantanamo prisoners. Australian Broadcasting reported defense
lawyer Lt. Col. Colby Vokey and legal aide Sgt. Heather Cerveny, who represent a Gitmo prisoner,
were ordered not to talk to reporters after they filed a formal complaint to the Pentagon about
the beatings.

When years from now historians and government officials reexamine precedents set by the U.S.
experience in Iraq, many "firsts" are likely to pop up.

One still playing out is the extraordinarily wide use of private contractors. A Congressional
Research Service report published last month titled "Private Security Contractors in Iraq:
Background, Legal Status, and Other Issues," puts it this way: "Iraq appears to be the first case
where the U.S. government has used private contractors extensively for protecting persons and
property in potentially hostile or hostile situations where host country security forces are
absent or deficient."

It quotes U.S. Army Corps of Engineers data that show "an increasing proportion of registered
supply convoys has been attacked." In the first 18 weeks of 2007, 14.7 percent of the convoys were
struck, according to the data, while only 5.5 percent were hit in 2005. Earlier this month, Rep.
Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill.) reported that Labor Department figures show 1,001 civilian
contractors had died in Iraq as of June 30, 2007.

The Defense Intelligence Agency is preparing to pay private contractors up to $1 billion to
conduct core intelligence tasks of analysis and collection over the next five years, an amount
that would set a record in the outsourcing of such functions by the Pentagon's top spying
agency.

The proposed contracts, outlined in a recent early notice of the DIA's plans, reflect a
continuing expansion of the Defense Department's intelligence-related work and fit a
well-established pattern of Bush administration transfers of government work to private
contractors.

WASHINGTON — Top Commerce and Treasury Departments officials appeared with Republican
candidates and doled out millions in federal money in battleground congressional districts and
states after receiving White House political briefings detailing GOP election strategy.

Political appointees in the Treasury Department received at least 10 political briefings from
July 2001 to August 2006, officials familiar with the meetings said. Their counterparts at the
Commerce Department received at least four briefings — all in the election years of 2002,
2004 and 2006.

CHARLESTON, W.Va. --A couple arrested at a rally after refusing to cover T-shirts that bore
anti-President Bush slogans settled their lawsuit against the federal government for $80,000, the
American Civil Liberties Union announced Thursday.

Nicole and Jeffery Rank of Corpus Christi, Texas, were handcuffed and removed from the July 4,
2004, rally at the state Capitol, where Bush gave a speech. A judge dismissed trespassing charges
against them, and an order closing the case was filed Thursday in U.S. District Court in
Charleston.

The ACLU said in a statement that a presidential advance manual makes it clear that the
government tries to exclude dissenters from the president's appearances. "As a last resort," the
manual says, "security should remove the demonstrators from the event."

Then-Attorney General John D. Ashcroft was "feeble," "barely articulate" and "stressed" moments
after a hospital room confrontation in March 2004 with Alberto R. Gonzales, who wanted Ashcroft to
approve a warrantless wiretapping program over Justice Department objections, according to notes
from FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III that were released yesterday.

One of Mueller's entries in five pages of a daily log pertaining to the dispute also indicated
that Ashcroft's deputy was so concerned about undue pressure by Gonzales and other White House
aides for the attorney general to back the wiretapping program that the deputy asked Mueller to
bar anyone other than relatives from later entering Ashcroft's hospital room.

The "Petraeus Report" -- the supposedly trustworthy mid-September reckoning of military and
political progress in Iraq by Army Gen. David H. Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan C. Crocker -- is
instead looking more like a White House con job in the making.

The Bush administration has been trying for months to restore its credibility on Iraq (as well
as stall for time) by focusing on Petraeus -- President Bush's "main man" in Iraq -- and his
report to Congress. But now it turns out it that White House aides will actually write the
"Petraeus Report," not the general himself.

And although Petraeus has a long history of literally and figuratively playing the good soldier
for Bush, it appears that the president still doesn't trust him enough to stay on message under
the congressional klieg lights.

Julian E. Barnes and Peter Spiegel wrote in yesterday's Los Angeles Times: "Despite Bush's
repeated statements that the report will reflect evaluations by Petraeus and Ryan Crocker, the
U.S. ambassador to Iraq, administration officials said it would actually be written by the White
House, with inputs from officials throughout the government."

In 2003, Room 641A of a large telecommunications building in downtown San Francisco was filled
with powerful data-mining equipment for a "special job" by the National Security Agency, according
to a former AT&T technician. It was fed by fiber-optic cables that siphoned copies of e-mails
and other online traffic from one of the largest Internet hubs in the United States, the former
employee says in court filings.

What occurred in the room is now at the center of a pivotal legal battle in a federal appeals
court over the Bush administration's controversial spying program, including the monitoring that
came to be publicly known as the Terrorist Surveillance Program.

Senior congressional aides said yesterday that the White House has proposed limiting the
much-anticipated appearance on Capitol Hill next month of Gen. David H. Petraeus and Ambassador
Ryan C. Crocker to a private congressional briefing, suggesting instead that the Bush
administration's progress report on the Iraq war should be delivered to Congress by the
secretaries of state and defense.

White House officials did not deny making the proposal in informal talks with Congress, but
they said yesterday that they will not shield the commanding general in Iraq and the senior U.S.
diplomat there from public congressional testimony required by the war-funding legislation
President Bush signed in May. "The administration plans to follow the requirements of the
legislation," National Security Council spokesman Gordon Johndroe said in response to questions
yesterday.

The U.S.'s top intelligence official has greatly expanded the range of federal and local
authorities who can get access to information from the nation's vast network of spy satellites in
the U.S.

The decision, made three months ago by Director of National Intelligence Michael McConnell,
places for the first time some of the U.S.'s most powerful intelligence-gathering tools at the
disposal of domestic security officials. The move was authorized in a May 25 memo sent to Homeland
Security Secretary Michael Chertoff asking his department to facilitate access to the spy network
on behalf of civilian agencies and law enforcement.

A top Smithsonian official has resigned after he destroyed records from a key Smithsonian Board
of Regents meeting.

James M. Hobbins, 64, executive assistant to the secretary of the Smithsonian, has acknowledged
destroying transcripts from a meeting in January when regents discussed then-Secretary Lawrence M.
Small's compensation, housing allowance and travel expenses among other things, according to
people who insisted on remaining anonymous because of the sensitivity of the case.

The sources said the documents were destroyed after Smithsonian General Counsel John Huerta
sent a memo to employees in March to retain documents. The directive came after the Senate Finance
Committee began investigating the Smithsonian in early February and an independent review
committee established by the regents later that month specifically requested the minutes and other
records from meetings.

Exhaustion and combat stress are besieging US troops in Iraq as they battle with a new type of
warfare. Some even rely on Red Bull to get through the day. As desertions and absences increase,
the military is struggling to cope with the crisis.

Lieutenant Clay Hanna looks sick and white. Like his colleagues he does not seem to sleep.
Hanna says he catches up by napping on a cot between operations in the command centre, amid the
noise of radio. He is up at 6am and tries to go to sleep by 2am or 3am. But there are operations
to go on, planning to be done and after-action reports that need to be written. And war interposes
its own deadly agenda that requires his attention and wakes him up.

When he emerges from his naps there is something old and paper-thin about his skin, something
sketchy about his movements as the days go by.

The private security industry has surged in Iraq because of troop shortages and growing
violence. After the March 2003 invasion, hundreds of foreign and Iraqi companies, many of them
new, signed contracts with the U.S. and British militaries, the State Department, the Iraqi
government, media and humanitarian organizations and other private companies.

The size of this force and its cost have never been documented. The Pentagon has said that
about 20,000 security contractors operate in Iraq, although some estimates are considerably
higher. Private security contractors have been used in previous wars, but not on this scale,
according to military experts. Several lawmakers have recently sought to regulate the private
security industry and account for billions of dollars spent on outsourcing military and
intelligence tasks that once were handled exclusively by the government.

Rep. Marcy Kaptur (D-Ohio), a member of the House Appropriations defense subcommittee who was
briefed by Aegis and the Corps of Engineers during a February visit to Iraq, said lawmakers are
only now realizing the scope of private security there. "We're in the wake of this speedboat. We
can't even catch up to the contracts," said Kaptur, who opposes the use of private forces and
initiated an audit of Aegis by the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, the second
the agency has conducted.

WASHINGTON, Aug. 10 — At a closed-door briefing in mid-July, senior intelligence
officials startled lawmakers with some troubling news. American eavesdroppers were collecting just
25 percent of the foreign-based communications they had been receiving a few months earlier.

"There was an intentional manipulation of the facts to get this legislation through," said
Senator Russ Feingold of Wisconsin, a Democrat on the Intelligence Committee who voted against the
plan.

"There was an intentional manipulation of the facts to get this legislation through," said
Senator Russ Feingold of Wisconsin, a Democrat on the Intelligence Committee who voted against the
plan.

There are now nearly as many private contractors in Iraq as there are U.S. soldiers — and
about half of them are private security guards equipped with automatic weapons, body armor,
helicopters and bullet-proof trucks.

They operate with little or no supervision, accountable only to the firms employing them. And
as the country has plummeted toward anarchy and civil war, this private army has been accused of
indiscriminately firing at American and Iraqi troops, and of shooting to death an unknown number
of Iraqi citizens who got too close to their heavily armed convoys.

MIAMI (Reuters) - One of the five British residents London wants freed from the Guantanamo
prison camp has already been cleared for release but will not be sent to his native land because
of fears he would be abused there, a Pentagon official said on Thursday.

The detainees in question are Shaker Aamer, a Saudi national; Jamil el-Banna, who is Jordanian;
Omar Deghayes, a Libyan; Binyam Mohamed from Ethiopia; and Abdennour Sameur, an Algerian.

"The constitution has been assaulted and brutalized," Mikey Weinstein, former Reagan
Administration White House counsel, ex-Air Force judge advocate (JAG), and founder of the Military
Religious Freedom Foundation, told me. "Thanks to the influence of extreme Christian
fundamentalism, the wall separating church and state is nothing but smoke and debris. And OSU is
the IED that exploded the wall separating church and state in the Pentagon and throughout our
military." Weinstein continued: "The fact that they would even consider taking their crusade to a
Muslim country shows the threat to our national security and to the constitution and everyone that
loves it."

During the Bosnian conflict, the United States provided about $100 million in defense equipment
to the Bosnian Federation Army, and the GAO found no problems in accounting for those weapons.

Much of the equipment provided to Iraqi troops, including the AK-47s, originates from countries
in the former Soviet bloc. In a report last year, Amnesty International said that in 2004 and 2005
more than 350,000 AK-47 rifles and similar weapons were taken out of Bosnia and Serbia, for use in
Iraq, by private contractors working for the Pentagon and with the approval of NATO and European
security forces in Bosnia.

A surprising number of people close to the case are dubious of Mohammed's confession. A
longtime friend of Pearl's, the former Journal reporter Asra Nomani, said, "The release of the
confession came right in the midst of the U.S. Attorney scandal. There was a drumbeat for
Gonzales's resignation. It seemed like a calculated strategy to change the subject. Why now?
They'd had the confession for years." Mariane and Daniel Pearl were staying in Nomani's Karachi
house at the time of his murder, and Nomani has followed the case meticulously; this fall, she
plans to teach a course on the topic at Georgetown University. She said, "I don't think this
confession resolves the case. You can't have justice from one person's confession, especially
under such unusual circumstances. To me, it's not convincing." She added, "I called all the
investigators. They weren't just skeptical—they didn't believe it."

Nevertheless, the SERE experts' theories were apparently put into practice with Zubaydah's
interrogation. Zubaydah told the Red Cross that he was not only waterboarded, as has been
previously reported; he was also kept for a prolonged period in a cage, known as a "dog box,"
which was so small that he could not stand. According to an eyewitness, one psychologist advising
on the treatment of Zubaydah, James Mitchell, argued that he needed to be reduced to a state of
"learned helplessness." (Mitchell disputes this characterization.)

Steve Kleinman, a reserve Air Force colonel and an experienced interrogator who has known
Mitchell professionally for years, said that "learned helplessness was his whole paradigm."
Mitchell, he said, "draws a diagram showing what he says is the whole cycle. It starts with
isolation. Then they eliminate the prisoners' ability to forecast the future—when their next
meal is, when they can go to the bathroom. It creates dread and dependency. It was the K.G.B.
model. But the K.G.B. used it to get people who had turned against the state to confess falsely.
The K.G.B. wasn't after intelligence."

A federal intelligence court judge earlier this year secretly declared a key element of the
Bush administration's wiretapping efforts illegal, according to a lawmaker and government sources,
providing a previously unstated rationale for fevered efforts by congressional lawmakers this week
to expand the president's spying powers.

The judge, whose name could not be learned, concluded early this year that the government had
overstepped its authority in attempting to broadly surveil communications between two locations
overseas that are passed through routing stations in the United States, according to two other
government sources familiar with the decision.

An Iraqi who was a key source of intelligence for MI5 has given the first ever full insider's
account of being seized by the CIA and bundled on to an illegal 'torture flight' under the
programme known as extraordinary rendition.

He was thrown into the CIA's 'Dark Prison,' deprived of all light 24 hours a day in
temperatures so low that ice formed on his food and water. He was taken to Guantanamo in March
2003 and released after being cleared of any involvement in terrorism by a tribunal.

Fewer U.S. environmental cops are tracking criminal polluters these days, their numbers
steadily dropping below levels ordered by Congress. They are pursuing fewer environmental crimes
in a strategy by the Bush administration to target bigger polluters.

The number of the Environmental Protection Agency's criminal investigators has dropped this
year to 174, below the 200-agent minimum required by Congress, even as the EPA's overall criminal
enforcement budget rose nearly 25 percent over three years to $48 million, according to EPA
records.

WASHINGTON -- A day after President Bush sought to present evidence showing that Iraq is now
the main battlefront against Al Qaeda, the chief US intelligence analyst for international
terrorism told Congress that the network's growing ranks in Pakistan and Afghanistan pose a more
immediate threat to the United States.

In rare testimony before two House committees, Edward Gistaro, the national intelligence
officer for transnational threats, said that Al Qaeda terrorists operating in South Asia are
better equipped to attack the United States than the network's followers in Iraq are.

WASHINGTON — Senate Democrats on Thursday called for a special prosecutor to launch a
perjury investigation of Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and subpoenaed White House political
adviser Karl Rove.

The moves against two of President Bush's longest-tenured confidantes raised the temperature in
what already was a heated political battle between the Democratic-led Congress and the Republican
administration.

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- FBI Director Robert Mueller told Congress Thursday that the confrontation
between then-White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales and then-Attorney General John Ashcroft in
Ashcroft's hospital room in 2004 concerned a controversial surveillance program -- an apparent
contradiction of Senate testimony given Tuesday by Gonzales.

FBI Director Robert Mueller testifies before the House Judiciary Committee Thursday.

Mueller said he spoke with Ashcroft soon after Gonzales left the hospital and was told the
meeting dealt with "an NSA [National Security Agency] program that has been much discussed,
yes."

"How can we trust your leadership when … you just constantly change the story, seemingly
to fit your needs to wiggle out of being caught, frankly, telling mistruths?" Sen. Charles Schumer
(D-N.Y.) asked.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) lamented that Gonzales' performance has so compromised his
agency that "it's almost as it the walls were actually crumbling on this huge department."

"There's a discrepancy here in sworn testimony," said Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick
Leahy (D-Vt.), who earned a clamor of applause from protesters after telling Gonzales to "be fair
to the truth."

Bush's comments were met with skepticism by some terrorism experts and former U.S. intelligence
officials, who said the president exaggerated or even misrepresent the facts in Iraq.

"I think what the president is saying is in some sense fundamentally misleading," said Robert
Grenier, former head of the counter-terrorism center at the CIA as well as the agency's mission
manager for the war in Iraq. "If he means to suggest the invasion of Iraq has not created more
jihadists bent on killing Americans, and that if Iraq hadn't been there as a magnet they would
have been attracted somewhere else, that's completely disingenuous."

The war "has convinced many Muslims that the United States is the enemy of Islam and is
attacking Muslims, and they have become jihadists as a result of their experience in Iraq,"
Grenier said.

Specter later circled back to Gonzales on the matter, warning him: "My suggestion to you is you
review your testimony to find out if your credibility has been breached to the point of being
actionable," Specter said. The maximum penalty for being caught lying to Congress is five years in
prison and a fine of $250,000 per count. Specter wryly noted to reporters during a break that
there is a jail in the Capitol complex.

Senator Jay Rockefeller, the top Democrat on the Intelligence Committee, who was involved in
the briefings at the time of the hospital visit, said the so-called Gang of Eight — the
eight top bipartisan members of Congress on intelligence issues — were not briefed about any
sunset the program was facing, as Gonzales claimed. He also emphatically refuted Gonzales'
statements that there was more than one program under discussion at the time and that the Gang of
Eight had agreed the program was so important that if it had been allowed to lapse they were
considering emergency legislation.

White House aides have conducted at least half a dozen political briefings for the Bush
administration's top diplomats, including a PowerPoint presentation for ambassadors with senior
adviser Karl Rove that named Democratic incumbents targeted for defeat in 2008 and a "general
political briefing" at the Peace Corps headquarters after the 2002 midterm elections.

The briefings, mostly run by Rove's deputies at the White House political affairs office, began
in early 2001 and included detailed analyses for senior officials of the political landscape
surrounding critical congressional and gubernatorial races, according to documents obtained by the
Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick J. Leahy threatened yesterday to request a perjury
investigation of Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales, as Democrats said an intelligence
official's statement about a classified surveillance program was at odds with Gonzales's sworn
testimony.

The latest dispute involving public remarks by Gonzales concerned the topic of a March 10,
2004, White House briefing for members of Congress. Gonzales, in congressional testimony Tuesday,
said the purpose of the briefing was to address what he called "intelligence activities" that were
the subject of a legal dispute inside the administration.

WASHINGTON -- Oregonians called Peter DeFazio's office, worried there was a conspiracy buried
in the classified portion of a White House plan for operating the government after a terrorist
attack.

As a member of the U.S. House on the Homeland Security Committee, DeFazio, D-Ore., is permitted
to enter a secure "bubbleroom" in the Capitol and examine classified material. So he asked the
White House to see the secret documents.

LONDON (Reuters) - NATO countries are not giving the international force securing Afghanistan
enough support and there are worrying signs that the Taliban are growing stronger, a detailed
study by Britain's parliament has found.

The report, by the House of Commons Defence Committee, highlighted a series of concerns, from a
lack of training for Afghan police and armed forces to an unclear policy on eradicating the
country's vast opium poppy fields.

But the chief preoccupation was a lack of support from other NATO countries to provide more
troops to the 36,000-strong ISAF mission and evidence that violence, including Iraq-style suicide
bombings, was growing as Taliban and al Qaeda-linked insurgents expand their sphere of influence
outwards from the south.

A new National Intelligence Estimate concludes that al-Qaeda "has protected or regenerated key
elements of its Homeland attack capability" by reestablishing a haven in Pakistan and
reconstituting its top leadership. The report also notes that al-Qaeda has been able "to recruit
and indoctrinate operatives, including for Homeland attacks," by associating itself with an Iraqi
subsidiary.

Although only a portion of the instability in Iraq is attributed to al-Qaeda and the group had
no substantial power base there before the U.S. invasion, Bush again cast the war as a battle
against its members, whom his aides have described as key provocateurs there.

BAQUBA, Jul 17 (IPS) - The largest morgue in Diyala province is overflowing daily. Officials
told IPS they have had to dig mass graves to dispose of bodies.

"The morgue receives an average of four or five bodies everyday," Nima Jima'a, a morgue
official, told IPS. "Many more are dropped in rivers and farms -- or it is sometimes the case they
are buried by their killers for other reasons. The number we record here is only a fraction of
those killed."

Ambulances, now able to move again after weeks of restrictions, have been removing bodies of
victims from the current fighting. But they have also found skulls and bones, evidence of other
killings long ago.

(AP) Forty-four former state attorneys general have asked Congress to investigate whether
politics at the Justice Department influenced the prosecution of former Alabama Gov. Don Siegelman
on corruption charges.

Last month, a Republican lawyer who worked on the campaign of Siegelman's opponent in 2006
signed a sworn affidavit saying that she overheard conversations among GOP operatives suggesting
that the White House was involved in Siegelman's prosecution.

The group includes Democrats and Republicans and is led by Jeff Modisett, an
Indiana Democrat, Bob Abrams, a New York Democrat, Bob Stefan, a Kansas Republican, and Grant
Woods, an Arizona Republican.

WASHINGTON -- There were 20.5 million decisions to classify government secrets last year, and a
report to the president found serious shortcomings in the process.

The Information Security Oversight Office said more than 1 in 10 documents it reviewed lacked a
basis for classification, "calling into question the propriety" of the decisions to place them off
limits to public disclosure.

The report comes as the office of Vice President Dick Cheney is refusing to cooperate
with the office of the National Archives. The report noted that Cheney's office "did not report
data to ISOO this year."

As early as December 2003, when the Marines requested their first 27 MRAPs for explosive
disposal teams, Pentagon analysts sent detailed information about the superiority of the vehicles
to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, e-mails obtained by USA TODAY show. Later pleas came from Iraq,
where commanders saw that the approach the Joint Chiefs embraced— adding armor to the sides
of Humvees, the standard vehicles in the war zone — did little to protect against blasts
beneath the vehicles.

Despite the efforts, the general who chaired the Joint Chiefs until Oct. 1, 2005, says buying
MRAPs "was not on the radar screen when I was chairman." Air Force general Richard Myers, now
retired, says top military officials dealt with a number of vehicle issues, including armoring
Humvees. The MRAP, however, was "not one of them." Something related to MRAPs "might have crossed
my desk," Myers says, "but I don't recall it."

Why the issue never received more of a hearing from top officials early in the war remains a
mystery, given the chorus of concern. One Pentagon analyst complained in an April 29, 2004, e-mail
to colleagues, for instance, that it was "frustrating to see the pictures of burning Humvees while
knowing that there are other vehicles out there that would provide more protection."

The analyst was referring to the MRAP, whose V-shaped hull puts the crew more than 3 feet off
the ground and deflects explosions. It was designed to withstand the underbelly bombs that cripple
the lower-riding Humvees. Pentagon officials, civilians and military alike, had been searching for
technologies to guard against improvised explosive devices, or IEDs. The makeshift bombs are the
No. 1 killer of U.S. forces.

House Oversight Committee Chairman Henry Waxman, D-Calif., and Tom Davis, R-Va., the
committee's top-ranking Republican, said Friday the documents were inadequate. They insisted that
the Defense Department turn over the additional material by July 25 and asked that the White House
do likewise.

Although Pentagon investigators determined quickly that he was killed by his own troops, five
weeks passed before the circumstances of his death were made public. During that time, the Army
claimed he was killed by enemy fire.

The President's Intelligence Oversight Board -- the principal civilian watchdog of the
intelligence community -- is obligated under a 26-year-old executive order to tell the attorney
general and the president about any intelligence activities it believes "may be unlawful." The
board was vacant for the first two years of the Bush administration.

The FBI sent copies of its violation reports directly to Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales.
But the board's mandate is to provide independent oversight, so the absence of such communications
has prompted critics to question whether the board was doing its job.

"It's now apparent that the IOB was not actively employed in the early part of the
administration. And it was a crucial period when its counsel would seem to have been needed the
most," said Anthony Harrington, who served as the board's chairman for most of the Clinton
administration.

The board now in place is led by former Bush economic adviser Stephen Friedman. It includes Don
Evans, a friend of the president and a former commerce secretary; former Adm. David Jeremiah; and
lawyer Arthur B. Culvahouse.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Managers at the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences may
have threatened employees about testifying to Congress about problems there, Chuck Grassley,
ranking member on the Senate Finance Committee, said on Thursday.

He asked National Institutes of Health Director Dr. Elias Zerhouni to ensure that employees at
the agency know they are free to testify.

"Several people, both inside and outside of NIEHS, alerted my staff to the fact that NIEHS
employees have recently had discussions with management that left them with the impression that
there would be retaliation if it was discovered that they had provided information to among
others, congressional investigators," Grassley, an Iowa Republican, wrote in the letter.